Bees
(coming soon) Social Structure Social Structure of the Honey Bee "The social structure of a colony of honey bees is fascinating. A single colony can include up to 30,000 insects, each of which performs a very specific function within the group. Honey bee colonies are well-run organizations. Certain bees are pre-programmed for breeding, collecting nectar, maintaining the hive or processing the collected nectar in the hive. These tiny workers have communication tools that enhance the productivity of their hive-mates."http://animals.mom.me/social-structure-honey-bee-7317.html Reproductive competition in queenless honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera L.) - (Page, 1994) Decision Making Byzantine Faults are dangerous: "A similar problem faces honeybee swarms. They have to find a new home, and the many scouts and wider participants have to reach consensus about which of perhaps several candidate homes to fly to. And then they all have to fly there, with their queen.9 The bees' approach works reliably, but when researchers are so unkind as to offer two hives, equally attractive by all the criteria bees apply, catastrophe ensues, the swarm breaks up, and all the bees die."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Examples_of_Byzantine_failures Three Genders? https://www.quora.com/Do-bees-have-three-genders-drone-worker-and-queen Honey Basically Bee Vomit? |HuffPo:/Thomson2017/FYI, Honey Is Basically Bee Vomit> :"As gross as that sounds, the way bees make honey is actually an amazing process. Bees collect nectar from flowers and they store it in their honey stomach, also known as the crop. Bees have another stomach, the ventriculus, for the food they eat and digest. In between the crop and their digestive stomach is the proventriculus, which not only feeds the bee’s digestive stomach nectar and pollen from the crop, but also ensures that the nectar in the crop never gets contaminated with the contents of the ventriculus. :Once at the hive, the forager bees regurgitate the nectar from their honey crop into a processor bee’s mouth." :"That processor bee then stores the nectar in its honey crop and regurgitates it to a bee that’s closer to the honeycomb for storage. So, honey is really the vomit of many bees combined. :During the collection and regurgitation process, the nectar is mixed with an enzyme in the bee that changes the chemical composition and pH of the nectar, making it better for long-term storage. Bees make honey as food to survive the winter months, so making it “shelf stable” is important. :After the bees store the honey into a comb ―and the vomiting finally stops ― they fan the nectar with their wings in order to make the excess water in the nectar evaporate." :"There is some disagreement about whether or not honey is technically bee vomit. It comes down to how one interprets the word vomit. Some say that honey is definitely not vomit because the nectar was not digested and because it’s voluntarily regurgitated. But those folks base their decision off Wikipedia definitions. If you look at the Merriam-Webster definition, vomit is an act or instance of disgorging the contents of the stomach through the mouth." Hormones http://www.beeculture.com/a-closer-look-endocrine-glands-hormones/ Communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_honey_bee_pheromones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_honey_bee_pheromones#Types_of_queen_honey_bee_pheromones Extinction Almonds https://abcnews.go.com/US/growing-california-almonds-takes-half-us-honeybees/story?id=52265334 :"One of those beekeepers, Chuck Kutik, rents his bees out across the country, throughout the year. He said there's one crop that demands more bees than any other -– almonds. In the winter, Kutik, and commercial beekeepers throughout the country, send the majority of the nation's commercial bees to pollinate almonds blossoms." https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/04/california-almond-farms-blamed-honeybee-die/ :"California dominates almond production like Saudi Arabia wishes it dominated oil. More than 80 percent of the almonds consumed on Planet Earth hail from there. Boosted by surging demand from China—overall, 70 percent of the state’s output is exported—California’s almond groves are expanding. The delicious nut’s acreage grew 25 percent between 2006 and 2013." :"Now comes more unsettling news: California’s almond groves are being blamed for a large recent honeybee die-off. :What do almond trees have to do with honeybees? It turns out that when you grow almond trees in vast monocrops, pollination from wild insects doesn’t do the trick. Each spring, it takes 1.6 million honeybee hives to pollinate the crop—about a million of which must be trucked in from out of state. Altogether, the crop requires the presence of a jaw-dropping 60 percent of the managed honeybees in the entire country, the US Department of Agriculture reports." https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/when-bees-go-extinct-these-foods-will-follow/ :"Which is a bit troubling seeming as bee populations have been on a rapid decline since 2006. It is estimated that for the past decade, beekeepers have seen a steady decrease of their bee populations by 30 percent each year. The average beehive can include 60,000 worker bees, so a 30 percent decline would mean a loss of 18,000 bees. When you consider the fact that it takes 1.6 million domesticated bee colonies to pollinate California’s almond crops every year, this massive loss across the nation’s bee colonies should not be taken lightly. :The Bulletin of Insectology definitively named the pesticides (specifically neonicotinoids) which are sprayed on our agricultural crops as the prime cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) which has lead to the disappearance of bees. Among the many species we stand to lose due to human activity, the bee is intrinsically linked to our own survival, and it is imperative that we do all we can to protect the bee species." https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/04/17/bee-apocalypse-was-never-real-heres-why-12851 :"The overall population of honeybees in the US, Canada and Europe has held steady or increased slightly since the widespread adoption of neonics in the 1990s. The US honeybee population hit a 22-year high in 2016, according to the figures released by the USDA before dipping slightly last year, and globally are at an all-time high." Neonicotinoids https://www.the-scientist.com/daily-news/bees-molecular-responses-to-neonicotinoids-determined-29922 :"Populations of honeybees have crashed in recent years, and many researchers have pointed the blame at a class of widely used insecticides called neonicotinoids. But studies have shown that not all the compounds are equally toxic to these critical pollinators, suggesting that there might be variation in how the insects metabolize them." :"Berenbaum emphasizes that the larger debate on neonicotinoid usage in agriculture needs to be understood in the context of additional bee stressors, from other pesticide classes to large-scale ecological disruptions such as habitat loss. “It’s an enormously complicated situation out there,” she says. “Focusing just on neonics, and thinking that banning neonics is going to fix things, I think really underestimates the magnitude of the problems that bees are dealing with.”" References Category:Insects Category:Eusociality Category:Biology Category:Evolutionary Biology Category:Revolutionary Biology